Fix the Zune Software

…“In IE, navigate to Tools, Internet Options, and then the Connection tab. Click the LAN settings button and then uncheck "Automatically detect settings."…

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/20/tip-of-the-week-speed-up-zune-marketplace-searches.aspx

This is amazing! Searches of the online Zune content from the Zune software are instantly fixed. And what an amazing difference. I’m surprised I never thought of this because I have seen this setting fix other similar problems.

If you have any cases where there is a initial hesitation by some piece of software that connects to the internet somehow, then try unchecking this setting. The reason is that because IE is the browser that comes with Windows, and the IE proxy settings are exposed via several APIs, they have become the de-facto global proxy settings, and many Windows applications check them before any internet communications. And this particuar setting says “go look around on your local filesystem and network to see if anybody has ever put one of the standard proxy config files in". There’s some long default timeout that will hurt you every time this is examined.

So even if you don’t run Zune software, and don’t use Internet Explorer, you should still go turn this off right now. Very cool!

Internet Explorer 8 driving me to Firefox and Chrome

I have remained a staunch supporter and user of Internet Explorer right along until now, even though I use Firefox on Ubuntu, and use Chrome for checking multiple Gmail accounts without changing logins, mostly because it was king of the hill, and it therefore followed that it had the widest support at websites.

So I have withstood the many security problems with IE, the lack of support and lack of direction between 6 and 7, and the ribbing of friends and advice of pundits, for literally years and years. However I am now thinking of changing my browser. What is driving me over the edge?

Strangely enough it is Windows 7. IE8 on Windows 7 sucks. Yes IE is a beta and Win7 is too. However they rev'd the IE8 beta for everything but Win7. And the general improvement in perceived speed and power in Win7 makes the problems I am having with IE8 really annoying.

Some concrete examples would probably give this diatribe more weight. Besides a tendency to crash or lock up, my chief pain point is the time to open the first window. I click on the link in the start menu and literally see no evidence my click "made it" for a minute. Chrome comes on like flicking a light switch in comparison. Firefox is only slightly behind Chrome.

It boils down to one thing. Computers have to get out of our way now and let us do work. We have tolerated the non-toaster-like behavior long enough. Enough computing power is available at this point to make the device disappear into the background as it should.

Problems with IE7 on Apple MobileMe

Right from Apple's description of MobileMe on their web store -
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB611Z/A?cid=OAS%2DUS%2DKWG%2DMobileMe

"Internet Explorer 7 is not fully supported. Internet Explorer 7 has known compatibility issues with modern web standards which affect web 2.0 applications such as MobileMe. You can use Internet Explorer 7, but you will not have access to all MobileMe features and will experience slower performance."

Yikes! It's only the most popular browser by a wide margin ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2 )! Why would you bother to make sure your site works with it when when you are charging $100?

Open IE7 with a list of URLs each in its own tab

Well I had spent some time when IE7 first came out, and then again maybe 6 months after, trying to find a solution for this. I want IE7 to open with multiple web sites already up, each in its own tab. IE7 does not support this via command line. I looked into scripting it, but didn't find anything really stable or usable.

However some more time has gone by, and somebody has figured it out:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2007/01/19/ie-automation-amp-tabs.aspx

I had to do some playing, adding try-catch blocks to each URL line, and then changing the order of the URLs around quite a bit. It seems that problems with the target site really affects this script. But I did get it to work reliably. Thanks Tony!

Internet Explorer for Mac and Linux

This for testing web development against IE, from Mac or Linux machines...

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page
http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/

Seen here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Webworkerdaily/~3/189386647/